Page 104 - Demo
P. 104
100nav lived in the mess. He got a note from the flight commander that his room was in such a mess he did not know what was clean or what wasn%u2019t and so he got nothing. Bill got a complete set of clothes and even found a condom in a pocket. John got a set of clothes but no shoes. I can%u2019t remember what the AEO got. We flew home after 3 days and later on in the news it was reported that a ship full of arms had been arrested by the Irish Authorities. In May I got to fire 2 AS11 missiles. This was something only co-pilots did and for weeks we had been practising moving a dot of light around a maze with a joystick. This would be very simple nowadays but was surprisingly difficult then. You had to do so many exercises which got harder with time and eventually you were deemed qualified to fire a live missile. The AS11 was had a range of a couple of miles, I think. When fired you needed wings level and then had to track towards the target as it was wire guided. The crew were all very excited by this and we flew to Cardigan Bay Firing Range I think to fire them. We were taught that after firing one of the missiles you had to sort of gather it up putting it below the target which was a white sheet held up over 2 floating old tip tanks. You then progressively brought it up to line up with the target. This I did, but as I tried to pull it up it failed to come up. With the stick hard back it went into the water a little before the target. I think it was held down by the weight of wire that trailed out behind it. The second one was the same although closer to the target. At this point I decided that I would put the thing straight onto the target and was confident of a hit. The last one I was going to fire was an AS12 which was the actual operational missile and was bigger with a greater range. The AS11s were training rounds. We ran in again sure of a hit and I fired it. Nothing happened. There was lots of checking but everything was properly selected and so we tried again. Another dud. There was now some discussion of what to do. Presumably, there was a fault in the firing mechanism but could a jolt or some stray electrical surges cause it to go off.
